Billion-Dollar Kiss

by Jeffrey Stepakoff

  TWO

  Bochco’s Blood

  “Television! Teacher, mother, secret lover.”

  —HOMER SIMPSON

  I was living in Pittsburgh in January 1988, finishing my graduate work in playwriting at Carnegie Mellon University, when I met my first real television writer, John Wells. Until that point, my carefully constructed life plan had been the same as all good playwriting students: get my degree, move to New York, find a roach-infested apartment, and start writing black-box theater. But after meeting Wells, I began to realize that writing and starvation did not necessarily have to go hand in hand. This meeting began a sequence of events that led to my first television writing assignment.

  Wells graduated from Carnegie in 1979. He worked in motion picture marketing and production, produced some plays, and had just recently started to focus on television. After writing a few scripts for Shell Game in 1987, Wells was working as an executive story editor on a half-hour film show called Just in Time. He came back to CMU to lecture the graduate students in the drama department about working in the entertainment industry.

  In a telling sign of the times, however, Wells’s arrival was not met with a stampede of résumé-shoving, wide-eyed young students. Sure, some curiosities were piqued, mainly those of the diligent, the unwavering note-takers determined to absorb every ounce of the education for which we were soon assuming decades of debt. But as far as I can remember, no one was running around saying “I have to meet this guy. I have to hear how I can get started in Hollywood.” This was partially a function of the murkiness surrounding television writing, and partially due to the fact that in 1988, especially for drama students, it was uncool even to watch TV, let alone consider working for it. You see, we were artists! We were studying Shepard and Mamet and Brecht. Those of us who watched the occasional Cosby episode kept it to ourselves.

  Nonetheless, we were all required to attend Wells’s lecture. With a sort of big-brother charisma that at once exudes authority and camaraderie, John described a world in which sets were built, just like in the theater, but not taken down after a handful of performances. He discussed how a new kind of quality television—like a powerful drama that would air on ABC in a few weeks called China Beach—was becoming more and more popular. And he hinted at a coming conflict between Hollywood writers and the studios that were growing increasingly frustrated with the writers’ demands for a bigger piece of what they created. When someone asked Wells about the kind of money writers earned, he didn’t miss a beat: “Look, there are three hundred people making a product for three hundred million. Writers are paid accordingly.” That this sounded very much like a negotiating position was lost on most of us present at the time.

  By the end of the lecture, even the most committed theater students were intrigued, both with Wells and the place he described—a place where he said writers were not only respected, but needed. After that lecture, I couldn’t get this place out of my mind.

  Over the next few weeks, I stayed in touch with Wells, elevating myself, I believe, from annoying student to obsessive wannabe. During this time I also began searching for others who might actually be able to help me find a way to pay the rent by writing. I went to the dean’s office and found a newsletter put out by the drama department’s West Coast alumni. I riffled through the recent accomplishments of the school’s luminaries, recognizing pretty quickly that most of them, such as Holly Hunter, Ted Danson, or Jack Klugman, would have very little use for me. Then I came across the name of a former playwriting student who, in my wildest dreams, I hoped might at least talk to me. My professor wrote a recommendation that I mailed along with my earnest letter of introduction, and a few days later Steven Bochco’s assistant called, saying he’d be happy to meet me.

  On Monday, February 22, 1988, I arrived in Los Angeles. No one ever forgets his or her first time flying into the L.A. basin. The implausible sight of ten thousand square miles of concrete—what was not so long ago an entire desert—paved and plumbed, lit up like some great endless movie premiere, with little regard for fault lines, geographic constraints, or limitations of any kind, imparts a devil-may-care sense of possibility. The effect is heightened by the first action taken by most who land at LAX: turning back watches. This gives the distinct impression that coming to Los Angeles has somehow cheated time. Indeed, one arrives in L.A. feeling younger.

  On Wednesday, February 24, I drove up to the 20th Century Fox main gate on Pico in my subcompact rental, my mullet perfectly blown dry, as was the fashion (business in the front, creative in the back). I found my allotted parking place and stepped out of the car. Carrying the slim leather briefcase that my mom gave me when I started a job in advertising three years earlier, and wearing the blue suit I had worn to a Macy’s buyer training program interview three and a half years earlier, I looked suspiciously like Michael J. Fox in The Secret of My Success. (Okay, I looked like someone trying to look like that.) Walking across the lot, gaping at the palms and fake sets, the soundstages and celebrities, my rep tie flapping in the Santa Ana breeze might as well have been a banner that read, FRESH OFF THE BOAT. Nevertheless, everyone I passed smiled at me. Not just because they knew I would soon find out that no one wears suits like that on the lot except agents—and I was certainly no agent—but because L.A. loves, or more precisely, respects, the neophyte. For that overdressed kid with the silly haircut can literally be your boss by the next fall television season, and an industry titan the next. But I’m getting ahead of myself…

  Steven’s office was in a legendary bungalow deep in the backlot dubbed “the Old Writers Building,” which I soon learned was a reference not to the forty-four-year-old Bochco, but to the indentured contract writers who toiled for the studio during the thirties and forties. I sat in Steven’s outer office, my legs crossed, perspiring like a bar mitzvah boy on the big day. Steven’s assistant, Marilyn, offered me some water, or rather, a choice of many different kinds of water. (Who knew there were so many different kinds of water!?) This made me perspire even more. As I opened a sparkling Crystal Geyser, I was instructed that, “He’s ready for you.” I stood, adjusted my tie, wiped the sweat from my brow, and entered his office.

  And there in front of me, talking on the telephone, was the writer whose new series, L.A. Law, had just swept the Emmys, arguably the most important person in the entire television business—wearing Keds, jeans, and a T-shirt that read ENTERTAINMENT PROFESSIONAL.

  Bochco put the phone down, turned to me, and said something that I would come back to again and again: “Hey, kid, what do you think a pint of my blood is worth?”

  Steven explained to me that he had just accepted a new series development deal with ABC, but before it could be finalized the network wanted to take out an insurance policy on his life. Evidently, after the nurse took Steven’s blood, it was somehow lost. And now ABC wanted more. He told me that he felt like he had given enough blood to networks over the years, and that this time he was gonna make ’em pay. He was joking, of course. Well, mostly.

  This was not the first time I’d heard about Steven’s deal. It had gotten a tremendous amount of media coverage. The landmark deal called for Bochco to develop ten shows over eight years. The trades and other press reported the widely rumored terms of the deal: It would pay him $10 million and he would retain ownership of the shows, so that whatever profit they earned after their initial broadcast would be his. The town was abuzz. The Los Angeles Times ran a story entitled STEVEN BOCHCO, THE $10-MILLION MAN. Eyebrows were raised. This was an unprecedented deal. But, in fact, it was more unprecedented than most knew.

  The entire deal had a veil of secrecy around it. The American Broadcasting Company was so concerned that the precise terms of the Bochco deal would get out that it even refused to send the contract to the State Mutual Life Assurance Company, which needed to see it in order to write a disability policy for Steven. ABC and the insurance company went back and forth on this for weeks. Finally, when State Mutual flatly refused to write a policy on
a contract that it wasn’t allowed to see, insurance executive Ralph Diller flew out from Boston, drove onto the 20th Century lot, was escorted by a guard to a secure room, searched, and left alone with the contract for three hours. Afterward, his handwritten notes were examined and he was allowed off the lot.

  State Mutual ended up writing a $20 million policy for five years to insure ABC’s investment. Clearly, this was no $10 million over eight years deal. (Years later, Time would put it closer to $50 million.) Throughout his years of providing special risk and unusual coverage policies for entertainment professionals and athletes, Ralph Diller had never encountered this kind of “extraordinary secrecy” before. What was ABC so concerned about? What was in that contract that was so sensitive? “Trade secrets,” was the explanation given to the insurance company. Perhaps ABC was concerned about the precedent they were setting. Perhaps they were concerned that other writers might start demanding more money and, even worse, greater profit participation. Just a couple of years earlier, the Writers Guild of America had gone on strike for more participation in the revenue streams of what they were creating. That strike ended terribly for them, but another one was shaping up, and this one looked like it could be epic. Perhaps the contract was so sensitive because the times were so sensitive. It wouldn’t be long before a $10 million deal would barely be headlines, but in 1988 it was a shitload of money to give a TV writer. Perhaps ABC was trying to keep the floodgates closed.

  Steven and I had a great meeting. We talked about Carnegie and writing and shows we liked. He agreed with me that thirtysomething, his Emmy competition, was good but said he couldn’t do something like that because “the brushstrokes were too small.” By the end he offered me a PA (production assistant) position when I graduated. As relieved as I was to have a respectable offer of employment, I couldn’t stop thinking about his question and what it really meant to be a TV writer. What is the value of a TV writer’s blood? Here was this affable man, dressed like a playwright, who wrote what he wanted, controlled what he wrote—hell, who owned what he created—a man so vital, so essential to the creative process that his very being had to be insured. What little I knew about Hollywood suggested that the contract writers who once occupied Steven’s office in the Old Writer’s Building, no matter how talented, were not this irreplaceable. Pretty much everything I (and everyone else) knew about TV writers was based on The Dick Van Dyke Show, and I sure couldn’t imagine Rob Petrie owning his own series, not to mention running his own production company. Even a clueless fresh-off-the-boat kid could see that things were changing for the Hollywood writer.

  After that meeting, I knew with certainty what I wanted to do with my life. Perhaps it was this ultimate control over the creative process that I found so appealing. Or perhaps it was the fact that a writer of television could dare merely to entertain thoughts about valuating his heart. What is the worth of a man’s blood when that man is directly responsible for some of popular culture’s greatest works, as well as more than a billion dollars in revenue? (And is a pound of his flesh any less valuable when this man is responsible for the likes of Cop Rock?) How do you place a price on what runs through the veins of a TV writer?

  Bochco’s question could not have been more prescient; for this would soon become the central issue in Hollywood.

  Later that afternoon, I drove over the hill and met with Wells on the Warners lot. It was raining outside that day, and I was drenched as I entered his small office. It may have been my aggressively eager manner, or my dripping blue suit and rep tie, or the fact that I was simply wearing a suit and tie, but Wells spent most of the meeting kind of laughing at me. I fired off question after question until John finally told me to relax and explained that the best way to break into television writing was to find a show that I liked and write a sample episode, a “spec” script. When I was finished with it, he said, I could send it to him.

  I don’t know if Wells was trying to get me off his back or if he really thought I’d do it, but when I got back to Pittsburgh I put most of my theater work on the back burner, tolerated the teasing from my classmates, and started watching television.

  Okay, I confess. This was not the first time I had watched television. This was not the first time I had watched a lot of television. The truth is, I knew the names of all the Sweathogs. I continued to watch Happy Days even after Fonzie jumped the shark. I could hum the complete theme songs to The Streets of San Francisco, The Rockford Files, and S.W.A.T. I proudly carried my Starsky & Hutch lunchbox to school. “Kiss my grits,” “Dynomite,” “Da Plane, Da Plane,” “Book ’em, Danno,” and “Good night, John Boy” were all part of the lexicon of my youth. And while Daisy Duke, Jaime Sommers, and Julie the Cruise Director certainly inspired much of the “must-see TV” of their day, I thought Valerie Bertinelli, with her winged and feathered locks, was the most definite evidence of a divine force in the universe I had ever seen. The truth is, I was raised on television. From The Courtship of Eddie’s Father to Maude, from Mary Tyler Moore to M*A*S*H, TV entertained me and taught me. For better or worse, television was my first, and I’m sure my most influential, window on the world.

  Now of course, my intimate relationship with television was not an oddity. Kids all over my neighborhood watched with a similar zeal. Although in the late seventies about 75 million American households had television, the most loyal and fastest-growing audience was young people. When I grew up, kids all across this country embraced their small screens with an ardency that made social critics wary, laid the seeds for sweeping conservative advocacy, and generally scared the bejesus out of parents. The only three possible contenders for our attention—sports, comics, and the opposite sex—could never ultimately usurp the supreme place that television had in our lives. TV in the seventies was as dependable and accessible as a best friend. One late-show comedian ruminating on his own obsession with television remembered the day his frustrated father asked him which he liked better, TV or his dad. The kid’s response: “Which channel?”

  However, even though we were committed to watching television with an unrivaled passion, it never occurred to the vast majority of us that making television was a viable career option. I certainly didn’t know any TV writers. I didn’t even know anyone who knew anyone who was writing in Hollywood. When I grew up, kids didn’t tell their parents, “I want to be the next Norman Lear.” An expressed interest in being an astronaut was met with much less skepticism than a desire to write for show business. In fact, kids would dream of being Steve Austin, a former astronaut who became the Six Million Dollar Man, before they’d consider being a Hollywood writer. We’d sooner dream of being Oscar Goldman than William Goldman.

  In 1979, I wrote my first play for extra credit in tenth-grade drama class, a suspicious act, I suppose, not so much for the play’s odd amalgamation of Tom Robbins–esque dialogue and Cat Stevens music, but rather because this was the one class in which I actually maintained a regular A. That was the same year my anxious parents took me to a private guidance counselor who administered the Motivational Appraisal of Personal Potential (MAPP) Assessment. This test, given to a lot of wayward youth in the seventies, determined what my parents and teachers had suspected: I was best suited for a “creative” profession. The test then matched me with several creative careers for which I would be best suited, such as iron fabricator, brick mason, mechanical illustrator, and advertising copywriter.

  I imagine the main reasons the tests and the counselors who administered them overlooked TV writer as an option for kids like me was mainly because it was such an obscure profession. Most of the young people who really knew anything about it in the seventies already had family members in show business or grew up around it in Los Angeles. I’m sure Bochco’s father, who was a concert violinist, wasn’t too surprised to discover his son’s interest in an artistic career. Consider David Kohan and Max Mutchnick, future creators of Will & Grace, who learned about television as they literally grew up on Hollywood soundstages. David’s father,
Buz, was a well-known TV writer who wrote for shows like Happy Days, The Odd Couple, and The Carol Burnett Show. Max’s mom was a marketing exec on the Paramount lot. Lost creator J. J. Abrams’s parents produced TV movies. Buffy creator Joss Whedon’s dad was actually a TV writer. He wrote for many series while Joss was growing up, including Benson, Alice, and The Golden Girls. Even Joss’s grandfather wrote TV, including The Dick Van Dyke Show, The Donna Reed Show, and Leave It to Beaver. TV writers lived and worked in a close-knit esoteric community, in many ways figurative and literal, as a tight family.

  The primary way the few outsiders found out about the field and gained access to it was through a handful of select collegiate organizations that maintained strong ties to alumni in Hollywood. The Harvard Lampoon, an undergraduate humor organization that produced a satirical magazine, was the most notable. After brave Harvard students like Andy Borowitz, a former president of The Lampoon, laid a beachhead in Hollywood in the early eighties, before creating The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, many other “Lampoonys” followed, like Paul Simms, who would create NewsRadio, and Bill Oakley and Josh Weinstein, who would executive produce The Simpsons.

  Meanwhile, the rest of us kind of stumbled toward Hollywood. Our arms out, reaching through the fog, we followed an inner compass that, despite being overlooked by aptitude tests and our caregivers’ attempts to recalibrate it, always, instinctively, pointed to magnetic west.

  Before stumbling into Wells, Bochco, and others who I would learn were key members of the growing “West Coast Drama Clan,” Carnegie Mellon’s answer to the Harvard Lampoon, I focused my attention on playwriting. After gaining admission to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with help from its drama department, I spent much of my college years writing plays. You see, in the absence of film and TV writing classes, playwriting filled a void. Drama departments in the eighties were fertile little islands for writers. Plays were regularly produced. Clubs quietly flourished. Drama departments offered a training ground where students could take chances, make mistakes, and safely find their voices as writers.